Another strange idea of the ancients was that the elephant when pursued by the hunters beats its tusks against the trees until they drop off, as he has a shrewd suspicion that it is his ivory rather than himself that they want. The elephant, sagacious beast, would appear to have as good a notion of the value of his tusks to the hunter as his pursuer himself has. We are told that “when they chance to be environed and compassed round with hunters they set foremoste in the ranke to bee seene those of the heard that have the least teeth, to the end that their price might not be thought worth the hazard and venture in chace for them. But afterwards, when they see the hunters eager and themselves over-matched and wearie, they breake them with running against the hard trees, and, leaving them behind, escape by this ransome as it were, out of their hands.” Another curious fact is that “their skin is covered neither with haire nor bristle, no, not so much as in their taile, which might serve them in goode steade to driue away the busie and troublesome flie (for as vast and huge a beast as he is, the flie haunteth and stingeth him), but full their skinne is of crosse wrinckles lattiswise: and besides that, the smell thereof is able to draw and allure such vermine to it, and therefore when they are laid stretched along, and perceive the flies by whole swarmes settled on their skin, sodainly they draw those cranies and crevices together close, and so crush them all to death. This serues them instead of taile, maine and long haire,”—one striking instance the more of the wonderful compensatory powers of Nature! [Illustration: FIG. 13.]